Biden vs. Trump 2024
Under normal circumstances, any candidate receiving 81.1 percent of the vote would be considered a runaway victor. The same is true, if slightly less so, for a candidate with 68.2 percent of the vote. Yet today with the future of representative government at risk, the Michigan primary results that yielded those percentages created more questions than answers about the November presidential election.
While Biden is seen as a bulwark defending United States governmental institutions, his age and his support for Israel in the Gaza War have left pockets of Democratic voters deeply alienated. Hence the 13.3 percent of the Michigan vote for “Uncommitted” rather than for Biden. Less commented on is the retreat from Trump among Republican voters. In the Michigan almost one third of the votes cast in the Republican primary did not go to Donald Trump; 26.5 percent went for Nikki Haley, 3.0 percent for “Uncommitted,” and 2.3 percent for “Other.”
Though it is all but certain that Biden and Trump will be presidential candidates, both possess intractable vulnerabilities, most recently revealed in Michigan.
Biden’s age and his policies with regard to the war in Gaza are the principal sources of voter disaffection from him. Obviously, he can do nothing about the former. His age is a handicap that will continue to act as a drag on his reelection effort. That is of course, unless he ultimately follows the lead of Lyndon Johson and retires from the race.
But on the assumption that Biden will remain a candidate, he finds himself with both a military and a political problem if he calls for a permanent ceasefire in the Middle East, a position advocated by many of the “Uncommitted” in Michigan. But calling for one is not the same as achieving it. A cease fire would have to involve agreement by both sides in the war. At the moment, that seems a long shot. When Hamas attacked Israel in October, it did so with strategic objectives in mind. It is not clear that it is ready to give up on those goals by agreeing to end its military effort.
At the same time, Netanyahu has not abandoned his determination for Israel to impose unlimited vengeance on the Palestinian population. The fact is that a cease fire may be beyond Biden’s ability to successfully negotiate.Furthermore, a Biden endorsement of a permanent cease fire would create a serious political problem for him. His gain in voters who seek an end of hostilities could be offset by an exodus of Democrats who unreservedly support Israel.
Whatever the dilemmas facing Biden, Trump’s problems are even more formidable. With the passage of time, his rhetoric has become more unhinged, and his vulnerability to civil and criminal convictions has intensified. He can do little with regard to either. The court cases will proceed, and as his attacks on the judiciary increase, the authoritarianism of the Trump political brand will be amplified more than ever. Trump’s difficulties are so attached to his anti-democratic propensities that it is hard to imagine his winning the electoral allegiance of independents or those Republicans who have opposed him in the primaries.
Michelle Goldberg is not wrong when she has written in the New York Times that the big question for Biden is how many of those “Uncommitted” Democratic voters he can win back. But for Trump, the need to convince enough Republicans to vote for him is even more daunting. The almost one-third of Republicans who voted for Haley in Michigan, for example, are very unlikely to turn to him.
What is more likely to swing the 2024 election than the ability of the presidential candidates to resolve the dilemmas facing them is the Republican Party’s eagerness to attack reproductive rights. It is rare that politics intrudes so explicitly and deeply into people’s private lives as has the Supreme Court’s revoking of the national right to secure an abortion. And even more draconian was the recent Texas court ruling that embryos should be considered as persons, and that abortion bans can be extended to them.
These are positions whose oppressive consequences are understood to be unacceptable by a wide swath of the population. Americans’ hostility to curbing reproductive rights was revealed in both the 2020 and 2022 elections, when the losing Republicans were saddled with the unpopular stance that women and men are not free to make their own reproductive decisions.
In the coming election with both candidates burdened with problems they cannot resolve, it is the Republican Party’s propensity to intrude on reproductive freedom may prove its undoing. In that case, Trump will be defeated because an out-of-touch Republican Party has again overreached on social issues.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jay Mandle is the Emerita W. Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics, Emeritus,at Colgate University. His many books include Change Elections to Change America: Democracy Matters Students In Action, and Creating Political Equality: Elections As a Public Good,. Mandle’s regular monthly editorials, Money On My Mind, appear on the Democracy Matters website, and explore the role of private money in politics and other critical social issues.
The views expressed in Money On My Mind are those of the author, (not necessarily those of Democracy Matters, and are meant to stimulate discussion.